techslog

Information week reports about the cost of BI products and how companies are trying to address that as they have BI initiatives on their plate in the coming year- many continue to grapple with the cost and complexity involved in deploying the technology.
Well, I guess the BI vendors are listing as this week they unleashed a number of offerings they claim will solve some of these challenges.
Business Objects on Wednesday announced that it's partnering with eight vendors, including Teradata, IBM, Netezza, and VMware, to offer business-intelligence "appliances." In most cases these are integrated packages that include Business Objects tools for such things as analysis and reporting and its partners' data warehouses, and may include hardware. These pre-configured appliances will reduce installation, configuration, and deployment time for BI, according to Business Objects.
As we know the major cost in a BI install can be the configuration costs to map the software to address a specific business “issue” that might be a totally custom effort. These “appliances” are NOT this kind of solution; rather they address “generic” issues that most companies may be experiencing.
Similarly, IBM on Tuesday introduced IBM Balanced Warehouse, which includes pre-configured software, hardware, and storage, and also is designed for faster implementation. IBM will offer three classes of these data warehouses to reach large enterprises down to small- and medium-sized businesses. The entry level C-Class is an "out-of-the-box" system that comes bundled with Business Object's reporting tools, says IBM.
Out-of-the-box BI? Not by far, however InformationWeek has research on business intelligence, to be released March 17, they find that ease-of-use issues stand in the way of widespread BI adoption, forcing companies to undertake time-consuming and expensive training, which nearly 40% of 500 IT professionals surveyed cite as a major obstacle. Two out of five respondents cite initial investment in BI as a challenge, and ongoing costs are impacting nearly a third of those trying to deploy BI tools. Nearly half of respondents say they have difficulty showing a clear return on investment.
Despite these vendors' efforts, it's hard to imagine BI technology could ever be considered a simple, drop-in system that can help companies better understand their businesses. Business Objects partnered with Andrews, Brightlight, Hewlett-Packard, and others to provide consulting services to help businesses put together their ideal BI appliances, showing that considerable work may still be required to get the right kinds of information to the right people.

Information week BI article